Rachel Maddow Mocks Mitt Romney's 'Very Poor' Backtracking (VIDEO)

Rachel Maddow opened her Friday show by roundly lampooning Mitt Romney's attempt to back away from his statement that he is "not concerned about the very poor."

The GOP presidential frontrunner stepped into a landmine earlier in the week when he said those words to CNN's Soledad O'Brien, arguing that poor people have a "safety net" and that he wants to focus on the middle class.

On Thursday and Friday, Romney told a pair of interviewers that he had misspoken and mangled the point he was trying to make. O'Brien herself seemed skeptical about this line of defense, and Maddow was downright incredulous.

"Misspeaking is a real thing," she said, before playing a series of verbal gaffes by everyone from news anchors to John McCain. Romney's statement, she said, was not so much a misplaced set of words as it was a real statement of beliefs that people took issue with.

"You can tell what's a legitimate mistake and what is a slip of the tongue," she said. Maddow also wondered what Romney meant to say, if he had simply fumbled his words.

At the Daytona 500 race, Mitt Romney's <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mitt-romney-nascar-team-owners_n_1303029" target="_hplink">attempt to connect with voters went awry</a> when he admitted that he didn't follow racing as closely as "some of the most ardent fans."
"But I have some friends who are NASCAR team owners," he added.
At the same event, he told a group of fans wearing plastic ponchos, "I like those fancy raincoats you bought. Really sprung for the big bucks."
Romney later <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mitt-romney-garbage-bag-rain-gear_n_1313499" target="_hplink">defended the comment</a>, saying, "Look, I have worn a garbage bag for rain gear myself."